America's Competitors

Detroit Tsunami

The Violent Historical Hammer

Historical dates serve as re-enforcers of group integration or what Lasswell call intra-group propaganda of unity. These dates, celebrated as national events and holidays are January 1^st, triumph of the Revolution.  26^th of July of 1953, assault to the Moncada barracks.  January 28^th, birth of Jose Marti. December 10^th, national Independence Day.  March 8^th, International Women Day. March 13^th, assault to Batista’s presidential palace. From April 18^th to April 20^th the Bay of Pigs invasion or Playa Giron. Other historical events commemorated by Cuban students, workers and population in general are: Execution and death of eight students of medicine by Spanish troops on November 27 of 1871. The death of alphabetizers Conrado Benitez and  Alberto Domenech during the national alphabetization campaign in 1961. Death of Camilo Cienfuegos on October 28, 1959. Death of Che Guevara on October 9 of 1967 and posterior un-burial of his bones on July of 1997.

Other celebrated historical dates are, arrival of Yate Granma and the expeditionaries on December 2^nd of 1956. The combat at Alegria de Pio on December 5^th of the same year. The Sierra Maestra campaign. The battle of Santa Clara on December of 1958. The events of Lucha Contra Bandidos against the disaffected rebels in the Escambray mountains during the 1960’s, in the middle part of the island. The Crisis de Octubre, known as the Missile Crisis and other historical events of which the revolution is never short.

Events of the colonial period that are taught in history classes across the school system are: The death of native Indians Hatuey and Guama by the Spanish colonizers in the 16^th C. The rebellion of Pepe Antonio, led against the British army during the occupation of Havana by the British. Conspiracy of Rayos y Soles de Bolivar. Founding father Carlos Manuel de Cespedes freeing and leading his slaves in the struggle against Spain on December 10^th of 1868. Jose Marti as a young adolescent in prison; his literary works Simple Verses and the Golden Age. The Baragua protest; led by independence hero Antonio Maceo against the Spaniard troops, led by general Martinez Campos, on March 15, 1878. Mayor Ignacio Agramonte and the rescue of Brigadier Manuel Sanguily on October 8^th of 1871, regarded as an “insuperable act of heroism” by Fidel Castro. Death of El Mayor Ignacio Agramonte on May 11^th, 1873, during the battle of Jimaguayu. 24^th of February of 1895, Grito de Yara marking the relaunch of the independence war against Spain. Death of General Antonio Maceo, El Titan de Bronce, occurred on December 7 of 1896. The assault to the Trocha Jucaro a Moron, on November 28^th of 1895.

During the neo-colonial period, death of Julio Antonio Mella, on January 10^th of 1929.  Paquito Gonzalez Cueto, a 13 years old child who is the symbolic leader of Cuban pioneros, killed on September 29^th of 1933, during the funeral of Julio Antonio Mella. Death of Ruben Martinez Villena on January 16, 1934. The protest of the 13, occurred March 19^th of 1923 against the corruption of the government led by president Alfredo Zayas from 1921-25. Death of Antonio Guiteras on May 8^th of 1935. Niceto Perez, leader of the farmers is killed on May 17^th of 1946. Death of sugar cane union leader Jesus Menendez, on January 22th, 1948. Death of Aracelio Iglesias, Havana port union leader, occurred on October 17^th of 1948. Death of Frank Pais on July 30^th of 1957. Abel Santamaria death, on July 26^th of 1953. Bloody Christmas, from December 23^rd to December 26^th of 1956, when 23 people were killed. Cubans seem to solve all their disputes by way of the gun and I'm myself bewildered by the history of violence of which my country is made of, but that would be material for another article. I can keep adding names and events but I think what I have cited is enough to argue that dictatorship didn't come randomly to Cuba and that was rather a product and a response to this chaotic impulse driven culture and society.

Cuban Dog | Renelio Marin | YtaYta

Cuban Dog | Renelio Marin | YtaYta

The Cuban Blogger as Enemy of the State

The cyber-war is a war that is “not made of bullets or bombs”, as the narrator for the propaganda series “Las razones de Cuba” –the reasons of Cuba- puts it.  This tale starts with the recognition of the mission statement of  the State Department’s “cybercomando”, which is no other than to defend the US for a cyber attack. Somehow the word “defense” is put out of context in a manner that the mission of the State Department becomes to cause all kind of havoc across the world from the keyboard of an American computer.

A Cuban guy with a big mustache explains in this national television series what is the cyber czar, who according to him is under the orders of a general who is under the order of Obama. Is this how the Cuban propaganda machinery is spending its money? I’m wondering. But whether inflated puppet or not this moustache with glasses is manipulated, without him knowing it, to give us the foot to a huge lie that starts trying to prove that “since the 1990’s computers are not just mere office tools but agents of war, instruments of war”; the whole propaganda message has just been synthesized and laid down and amounts to this: Don’t use the Internet since the Internet and the WorldWideWeb is a demon and a tool of the enemy’s effort to overthrow the Revolution. Mr. mustache goes on to tell how cyber attacks were conducted during the Persian war against Iraqui troops (oh yes, they always choose to defend those kind of friends) and goes on putting into words for us how an innocent information student could build an elemental virus and launch it against US facilities, which in time would respond by attacking back with conventional arms; picture this against a background of videogame warfare with US helicopters and fight jets coming out of a computer screen flying towards the viewer followed by George W. Bush Nosferatus face and smile (viewer screams in terror). At this point I wonder what is the reason behind going so far away in time and use Bush instead of Obama to build the propaganda argument. The answer, from the propagandist point of view cannot be other than the recognition that Obama's face, personality and above all race, makes him unsuitable for propaganda purposes. His smile and skin are capable by itself of destroying any argument against the American democratic system. It is not fortuitous that Obama's words in Cairo some years ago have boosted a tsunami of revolutions across the Arab world. Obama's face is too dangerous to show even in a propaganda video. Therefore the need to go back to evil Bush.

The narrator –not Mr. moustache- goes on then to recall the meeting that George Tenet, then chief of the CIA under Clinton administration and George W. Bush had together with the chief of defense intelligence to render Cuba as capable of cyber offense and a threat to US national security. That meeting took place around the year 2001, but is not difficult for the narrator to link it to 16 cyber-students that graduated in June of 1995 from the University of National Defense and that were part, according to the narrator, of a plan by “the ultra-conservative Yankees potentiating new pretexts and scenarios of confrontation to calumniate the Cuban revolution and propitiate an eventual aggression against the island”. From there the narrator takes a leap to April 19, 2010, saying that the Bush institute organized a conference to plan the strategy of cyber-war against countries that are considered enemies, among them Cuba. At this point the intelligent reader have noticed that all this talking, back-grounded by suggestive imagery, serves the purpose of distributing roles in this farce of victim and aggressor. The role of the victim played by the little communist island of Cuba, and the role of the aggressor by, who else could be, the Empire.

The narrator goes on to put a name and a face on the monster characters: Dr. Jeffrey Gedmin, president of Free Europe/Radio Liberty; Jennifer L. Windsor, executive director of Freedom House and ex-director of the USAID; and voila, the next name goes to “mercenario” Ernesto Hernandez Busto, a Cuban journalist whose crime has been to provide some Cuban bloggers with a Web host for their blogs banned in Cuba (portray of Mr. Bustos goes covered by a dollar bill and American flag clouding his glasses). 

The circle is closed by putting in the same foot George W. Bush; Freedom House and Claudia Cadelo, a young Cuban blogger from the“obscure corners of the world”. The first part of this Oulanem farse has been set, the characters has been constructed, so far we know who the victim is –Cuba-- and who the aggressor is –US--; who are the demons –young Cuban bloggers-- and who are the saviors –old Cuban communist croonies and blowers. The demons are the Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the “cyber-dissidents” behind them used to “promote revolutions and great concentrations” in the world.  From then we go into the war in Yugoslavia and what the US army did to intervene in Yugoslav cyber space, followed by the 24/7 monitoring of the Cuban cyberspace by the State Department that started “the cyberwar against Cuba”. In this context monitoring is already war.

An old fatty man who features himself as a blogger --but who is nothing else than an official cyber propagandist or in another words a blower-- raises the twisted logical argument that because the main Internet content providers of the world, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, are in the US and the US is in war against Cuba therefore Google, Facebook and Twitter are against Cuba. What a dexterous way of using syllogism, which is paired by a description of the international media campaign that has as an aim “to demonize socialism as a limiter of freedoms and an enemy of information access”. Is this demonization or just plain truth? Please old fatty man don’t toss yourself across your comfy armchair playing strangled lamb while telling lies about the Spanish newspaper ElPais belonging to a big corporation whose purpose is to overthrown the Cuban Revolution.

Narrator and other character goes on to criticize Youtube’s decision to shut down more than 400 videos that Cuban official site Cubadebate has been uploading into its Youtube channel for propaganda purposes, linking the government of the US to Youtube and the decisions that Youtube executives and owners make regarding Youtube policies of copyright infringement, which is the argument that Youtube used against the Cubadebate site. Mr. pot belly continues his tirade asserting that Cuba is in a state of permanent cyber-war, which is another classic argument, the everlasting state of war that justify a state of exception and extreme governmental measures in Cuba. Despite his strong logical paranoid constructions  it escape to Mr. pot belly to realize that the “permanent state of media war” calls for extreme measures such as limits to the free flow of information and total control of the mass media and Internet. Instead the lies of Mr. pot belly takes humongous stature when he says that “a numerous group of people gets paid to post comments against Cuba” on websites, blogs and social media and that these people have found a new way of battling the global economic crisis by posting comments that are not intended to discover “the truth about Cuba” but to invade, not with an academic or scientific debate but political debate”. At this point I have to say that unfortunately most of the comments posted by Cubans across the Web are political in nature and most of them are shallow in intelligence and culture when not fully and openly aggressive.

After that a young guy gives a description of how he discovered what a blog is. Although the young guy recognizes the main difference between traditional media and new media which is no other that the two-directional way of blogging against the uny-directional way of classical media, this doesn’t preclude the narrator from judging the young Cuban cyber-writers as “the new type of counterrevolution made of bloggers” that has been organized by the US in order to create internal conflicts using the new technologies of information  and communication. Which “has demonstrated destabilizing capacities in other international sceneries”. And here we have arrived to the heart of this assemblage of lies and distortions which is no other that to engender fear and send the message that from now on bloggers and Internet users are going to be openly regarded as enemies of the state. The power of the Internet and the new technologies to organize people behind the common goal of overthrowing tyranny and spreading freedom, proven by the explosions of the Middle East revolutions, is enough cause to proscribe and alienate the Cuban blogosphere.

A culprit has to be put forward in this orchestration of fear and hate as well as proof of wrongdoing has to be provided if we are going to tell the masses were to direct their anger and frustration. The wrongdoing comes in the shape of international awards that Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez has received from respected institutions such as the Ortega y Gasset Prize by the Spanish newspaper ElPais and the Maria Moors Cabbot Prize by Columbia University, among others. The prizes in conjunction amount to the sum of 500 thousand dollars and they are described by Mr. pot belly as laundered money coming from the CIA and the State Department, an argument that has been heard many times from the mouths of the jackals of the Cuban counter-intelligence. Turns out that Yoani Snachez is single-handely poring fresh money into Cuban economy but the state apparatus doesn’t have as its aim to care for the well and prosperity of Cuban citizens. To allow Cuban people to get money in their pockets by any legal way would be to empower them and thus to pose a threat to the state control of the population. One Yoani Sanchez or several of them with access to information, means of mass communication and money in their pocket is in Cuban governmental terms a threat to national security. Add to that the old socialist dogma of social equality, which in reality is the partition of society into two fields, the enormous miserable destitute majority on one side and the privileged, filthy rich, power elite nomenklatura on the other.

Thriller Alfred Hitchcock music in the background and an account of Yoani’s numerous awards and we have reached the climax of our farce whose purpose is no other than to demonize and criminalize what constitute normal behavior in every civilized part of the world. In big, circled letters, 500,000 dollars in journalism awards by respected international institutions become the proof of criminal behavior. To gain money by legal means in Cuba in particular and in socialism in general is a crime because it creates inequality. This inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor needs to be reduced by making the poor poorer and the rich more secretive about his wealth.

Picture Hillary Clinton’s speech at the State Department naming Yoani Sanchez as one of the recipients of the Women of Courage Prize and Barack Obama’s response letter to Yoani and the killing Khmer Rouge field of propaganda is oiled and ready. Name calling goes from beginning to end, bloggers are continuously called counterrevolutionaries and mercenaries, these words hammered time and again on the viewers psyche to shape their perception, to create prejudice, to dehumanize, to prepare the scenery for hate and crime, the same way fascism and Nazism does it, following the classical structure of Ethos, Pathos and Logos, seeking to destroy the person Ethos and character.
In a soft voice the narrator says that the new faces of the Cuban counterrevolution are not “the resented and tired old faces” but the new bloggers “ which “will be presented as the fighters for freedom of expression in the Web that claim the free access to the Cubans to free information”. Alas, in the whole length of this feature for the first time I have heard the truth, but the truth bent over, twisted and put at the service of a merciless lie. And then we go to police footage as a proof of the bloggers’ delinking behavior visiting the US and Europeans embassies in Havana. The “cyber-mercenary” Yoany making immigration arrangements to travel to receive one of the numerous prize given to her, visas handled by those embassies but that Yoani has never being able to put to use since the Cuban government has always denied her a permit to travel since she is one of its most valuable Cuban slaves.

Wikileaks comes into play by providing information about how Yoani Sanchez asked sub-secretary of State Betty Williams for a credit card and a PayPal accounts. Yes, Cuban slaves have reached such a low point of  dependency that they have to ask strangers for means to get a PayPal account to receive awarded money. Talking of dignity? This is what the Cuban government and the Cuban Communist Party has made of young Cubans, mere second or third category citizens who cannot even have a credit card or a PayPal account; the myth of the counterrevolutionary blogger ends here.

The rest of this propaganda video  becomes integrative propaganda where the so called revolutionary bloggers, the blowers as like to call them, sing their dytyrambs extolling the goodness of the Cuban revolution and the free flow of information and communication but without a phone and without Internet at home as revealed by one of the blowers interviewed, her ignorance and blindness so deep as to call Internet unnecessary; having not the conceptual means to trace a link between information, communication, Internet and development. If you get to see the video you would realized that I have not spent time talking about the "muela" of the commander in chief, it is first half 20 C. propaganda and is not worth it the comment.
The root of the governmental hate and aversion to the bloggers and Internet users is to be found in the generational divide that cuts across Cuban society. The old generation that is still in power after more than a half a century is aware of and fears the new generations, the youth that is discovering the reality of the world through Internet and that the government cannot hide anymore with the iron curtain of state controlled media. This youngsters are coming to claim their rights as citizens of the world of the 21 C. which include not only Internet connection and access to information and communications but also freedom to travel, accountability of the power holders and the right to participation in the political decision making that affects their lives.

The Future is Dead

Having dictated the way of the future, the pantheon of the dead, expressing themselves best with the slogans Patria o Muerte and Socialism o Muerte (Country or Death and Socialist or Death), announce that there is in fact no future and that the idea of it is dead in itself; a future killed by the doctrines and political programs of 19^th  and 20^th  C. philosophers, politicians and revolutionaries.

The lack of private property rights and individual entrepreneurship, in tandem with the lack of responsibilities and parasitism that subsided socialism and free health care and education for an otherwise capable workforce engenders, is the best organoponico or raised bed garden for a youth that is apathetic and without spirit of enterprise, their motivation motor defused  by the political and economic system. Add to these ills double morality and raw survival skill and you have the perfect poor Jean Baptiste Clamence “living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in history" (Albert Camus, The Fall 281).

The flip side of this apathetic, un-motivated, cynical existentialist is a Janus faced with an over-confident, inflated ego. How can this contradictory features can exist in the same person is explained by the miracously powers of propaganda. A weakened, isolated individual is forced to be part of a horde and bombarded since the moment is born with a plethora of nationalist and chauvinistic slogans such as ‘Somos un hueso duro de roer en la garganta del Imperio” (We are a though to bite bone in the throat of the Empire); “Playa Giron, primera derrota del imperialismo yanki en Latinoamerica” (Bay of Pigs, the first defeat of American imperialism in Latin America); “Fidel, seguro, a los yanquis dale duro” (Fidel, sure, hit the Yankees hard”); potluck that with speeches, newspaper editorials, filtered news and school indoctrination and you have the recipe for a people with a conviction of political mesianism and sense of racial superiority.

 

Double Morality: A Case of a Cuban Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The state is not concerned with private opinion but with public opinion. Because propaganda is aimed at structuring, organizing and directing group behavior personal thought and private opinion is irrelevant. What government is concerned is with group behavior. It doesn’t matter if in your inner self you hate Marxist ideology, Fidel Castro or the Cuban Communist Party. It doesn’t matter if you express your personal views on politics at home as long as they don’t influence the behavior of the group. It is important that your private opinion stays private and the government takes care that you cannot reach any means of mass communication, whether print, radio, TV or Internet blogging and else.

Rendered impotent and entrapped in the maze of mass organizations and the like the individual develops a split personality, one half made of his truncated, buried private thinking, the other one of his public behavior. One person at home, another in Revolution square. A sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hide of ideology. Because is needed to survive and to prosper a double morality spread to all areas of life and society. They all hate the Cuban government and especially Fidel Castro, but on May 1^st they all go to Plaza de la Revolucion to chant ditirambic praises of the Revolution and its Commander in Chief.

Cult of the Dead

In close relation the myth making and the formation of national identity is the cult of the dead. Holydays are established across the year to commemorate the dead. Starting with the celebration of the Triumph of the Revolution on January 1^st a sort of Revolutionary calendar is made of, Roman numbers included. Dates of cult of the dead are July 26^th, the day of the assault to Moncada barracks in 1953 and particularly the torture and death of Abel Santamaria. Death of Commander Camilo Cienfuegos, occurred on October 28 of 1959. Death Antonio Benitez and Manuel Ascunce Domenech, heroes of the Alphabetization National Campaign, cowardly assassinated on January 5^th and November 26^th  of 1961 respectively. And many other death “efemerides”. These deaths have been given mystical rendition in songs and hymns such as the Hymn of Alphabetization and the Song of the Chosen One, thus becoming powerful conveyors of propaganda messages.

The cult of the dead reached absurd highs and perverse connotations with the discovery and relocation of the bones of Che Guevara. Che’s remains were brought from Bolivia and exposed inside a wooden urn at Plaza de la Revolucion.  Much talk has been shed about the authenticity of the bones, but whether authentic or not, million of Cubans parade before them at Plaza de la Revolucion during several days of the year1997, brought in by trucks and buses from work and school places

Year after year on the anniversary of the disappearance of Camilo Cienfuegos, who died on October 28 of 1959 during a flight from Camaguey to Havana, Cuban children around the country march by the coastline to throw flowers in the waters of seas and rivers. Not only children, adults do so too. I remember going from the classroom, together with other hundreds of schoolmates and teachers to join the procession to the waterfront of Havana –malecon- to throw flowers in the sea. And as an adult going from my workplace, each of us a flower in hand, walking across the city on the way to the malecon.

The cult of the dead cut across time and space. Across time a connection is established between past, present and future. The dead of the past enforces the moral obligation to endure a present that would give way to an imagined future for which the dead gave their lives. Not to sacrifice everything for that future would be tantamount to betrayal of the dead. To abandon the promise of socialism and communism would be the recognition that the martyrs and heroes have died in vain. The program of the Revolution and Marxist materialism thus needs to be fulfilled. No matter how many proofs the present can provide about the failure of the principles of Marxist economic politics and socialist doctrine, the future acquires religious status and the dead are it saints.

The blood shed in combat nurtures the soil and becomes the semen of a forged identity. Thousands of Cubans have died in Angola, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Congo, Bolivia, Ethiopia, the blood spread in those countries permits a claim to possession. A spiritual connection is established between the buried corpse and the minerals that covers and surrounds it, the plants that feed upon its remains and the animals that roam and eat these plants. Home and country is where you are buried, therefore Hugo Chavez doesn’t have any problems when he publicly recognizes that as of April 16 of 2010, out of a total of 35,000 Cuban doctors, nurses and teachers, 69 doctors have died in Venezuela. These deaths are compensated by deliverance of 100,000 barrels of oil and derivatives daily to Cuba, thus confirming the connection between blood and soil and the forging of identity by their mix.